9.6 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Pages 219 Originally published 1960 Page count 219 | 4.8/5 Goodreads Language English ISBN 978-0904014488 Subject Unconscious mind | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback) Similar Works by Lancelot Law Whyte, Unconscious mind books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Unconscious Before Freud is a 1960 book about the history of ideas about the unconscious mind by Lancelot Law Whyte. The work was positively reviewed and became a classic.
Contents
Summary
Whyte, writing from a nonpsychoanalytic perspective, describes the two thousand years of thinking about the unconscious that preceded Sigmund Freud, showing how Freud's predecessors established its importance.
Reception
G. Stewart Prince reviewed The Unconscious Before Freud positively in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, writing that the material was "well selected and arranged", though he also expressed the wish that Whyte had devoted more space to Carl Gustav Jung. Psychologist Hans Eysenck wrote in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) that Whyte's book had become a classic. Historian Peter Gay called the work "a brief but helpful survey" in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), though he noted that it was less comprehensive than Henri Ellenberger's work The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970).